OS/partition help

RIZZEE

RIZZEE

RIZZEE

Soldato
Joined
31 Jan 2009
Posts
4,248
Location
London
right now i've got 2 partitions on my 500gb hdd, one with windows 7 and the other with vista
I basically want to get rid of the partition with windows 7 and have the whole hdd with vista, but im not sure how to do this, is there a way to do this without deleting everything on the hdd?
I can shrink the volume to a certain extent but i cant seem to get rid of the whole thing, any ideas?
help is much appriciated

Thanks!
 
First thing to check is whether the system is actually booting from the W7 partition or the Vista one - the system will initially boot from the same partition regardless of which OS you choose in the boot manager. If it's booting from the W7 one then things get a bit more complex because you'll need to re-instate the boot files on the Vista partition before it'll boot. I think that's just a case of running "fixboot" from a Vista recovery console but I'd check that first.

If the system is booting from the W7 partition then Windows won't let you delete the partition, you'll need to use something like Gparted to do it.
 
i used Partion magic and just Deleted the partion and that was it done! But i still have the option too boot up the other OS on start up not sure why that is.
 
when i boot it comes up with which os to boot from, but if i dont chose anything it'll boot with windows 7

ill take a look at partition magic, but im still confused with what to do
 
bob055 said:
i used Partion magic and just Deleted the partion and that was it done! But i still have the option too boot up the other OS on start up not sure why that is.
Click to expand...
All you've done is delete the partition. The boot.ini (or whatever it is that holds the boot list these days) hasn't been altered to change the boot options. With XP you can change these in the Properties option if you right click on My Computer. I don't have a Vista box to hand to check but it'll be something similar.

RIZZEE said:
when i boot it comes up with which os to boot from, but if i dont chose anything it'll boot with windows 7

ill take a look at partition magic, but im still confused with what to do
Click to expand...
Disk Management will tell you which partition is the boot one. Check that first before you start looking at third party tools.
 
In this case it's going to get messy. Windows (of pretty much any flavour) won't commit suicide by letting you delete it's own boot files so you'll need to use an external tool like GParted to do it.

Gparted will quite happily delete the W7 partition but the system will refuse to boot thereafter. The Vista recovery console should be able to reinstall the boot files on the Vista partition using the fixboot tool but don't take that as gospel. I've not done it myself so I'm not going to tell you to go and do something that might not work and leave you with a dead PC.

Hopefully someone who has done it can confirm.
 
Booting from the Vista CD, going to install new OS will take you to a screen where you can choose the partition to install to. You can also do disk ops there - just delete the 7 partition then go the recovery console repair options, if you can confirm it works.
 
sounds way too messy:(

cant i install vista over windows 7?
or buy a seperate hdd for the os and format my current hdd?
 
If you're happy to completely wipe your existing HDD then reinstalling from scratch is the simplest option. Just delete the existing partitions in the Vista installer and create a new partition covering the whole disk.

Sometimes it's easier to spend the time taking the necessary backups and start over than trying to work out how to do the messy stuff that *should* leave you with everything still intact.
 
ok, somehow i managed to get rid of the vista partition, so the only os on my hdd is windows 7..
can i simply install vista whilst keeping my files? or is that not an option?
 
hmm
whenever i chose to install vista on my hdd, it comes up with
Untitled-2.png

:confused:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom